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Well I watched Tron the other night after coming across some nice work by Anthony Mattox, which experimented with Perlin Noise. Quite possibly the worst film ever, but some fricken sweet artwork.

Perlin noise is a pseudo-random gradient texture, developed by Ken Perlin beginning with his work on the 1982 movie Tron. It continues to be a great tool to create textures and dynamic elements. The function generates a continuous string of values in any number of dimensions. Although it was initially developed to build textures it can be very useful for many other things such as particle motion. Noise is generated by a series oscillations over a variety of frequencies, similar to an audio signal. Processing supports Perlin noise in up to three dimensions and can be implemented by calling the noise function with the parameters for the coordinate.

Processing seems to be the way forward to achieve many of the effects I want, looks like I have some learning to do…

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An abandoned, dilapidated warehouse with a camera and projector inside. The projector plays what the camera records in a live loop, and people are encouraged to visit the installation. On the first day, visitors simply see themselves in real time in this warehouse, but on the second day, visitors catch glipses, memories of the happenings of the first day as they watch themselves. On the third day, memories of both the first and second day will randomly interrupt the live projections and so on until the final day which is simply an array of second-long clips of the recordings over the life-span of the installation. This will be only memories, but without context, the sort of memory one cannot remember why they remember. Introduced into the loop could be period footage, images, recordings from when the abandoned site was occupied. Memories of its users, its history…

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KANYE WEST “Welcome To Heartbreak” Directed by Nabil from nabil elderkin on Vimeo.

Another video here, this one is Kanye West’s ‘Welcome to Heartbreak’. Its obviously a hard life being as wealthy as Kanye.

Sounds better when your speakers are turned off…

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This ‘Data Moshing’ and ‘Glitching’ stuff is becoming more and more common by the day, this is a new video for the band Chairlift by Ray Tintori. Very effective, and a good song too…

Evident Utensil by Chairlift

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Attempts to introduce a form of ‘digital decay’ into a series of images by directly, destructively manipulating the ASCII/HEX code in TextEdit and HexEdit. Got some lovely effects. Of course I saved a copy of them all first….

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Initial effects achieved by editing a JPEG in a simple text editor. Results are initially subtle but the horizontal linear structure of the image code is obvious. Shifting lines of code in the text editor shifts the corresponding lines of pixels in the image, pretty predictable. Shifting larger blocks of text shifts larger bands of pixels, deleting blocks creates the grey bands. A little time however and some interesting effects can begin to take shape. Editing edited code proves to be successful, and editing the edited edited code further more. I’m looking into a way of automating this process…

Exploring the same process in HexEdit, an application for the easy viewing and manipulation of HEX and ASCII code. Initial results seem similar to those previous, if a lot more colourful. Replacing characters in the code seems to shift the hue of bands of pixels, the images becoming truly ‘glitched’. The ‘find and replace’ tool proves very useful for quickly and easily replacing certain characters with others. A good 5 minutes of this code mashing and the image becomes virtually unrecognizable from its original format…

Now using TIFFs rather than JPEGs and the effects are quite different. The lack of compression means the code is structured differently, and shifting characters now changes the position and colour of larger boxes of pixels, rather than the thin bands typical of a JPEG. The effect is overall more subtle. To the point where it can be hard to decipher upon first glance than an image has been glitched at all, even though it is significantly different to its original.

Attempts to Experimenting with two images at once, one taken recently by myself and the other an excellent old tintype of these gents in their new car from Bodie Bailey.

The process consisted of glitching both images separately to a point of suitable decay, opening them as layers in Photoshop, applying a blend mode, flattening and further glitching the resulting image. An attempt is made at linking poetic, human memory to its digital equivalence.

The interest is in creating a digital form of human memory. Computers remember ones and zeros, whereas we remember emotions, feelings, smells, sounds and sights. We have sudden flashbacks where our senses take us to a past time. Most of the time we have little control over when we experience these memories.

What would happen if this was replicated in the digital world? If when you took a new image with your digital camera, every so often a trace of a previous photograph would appear, randomly…

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I took a little trip around the east end to document some of the decaying, dilapidated buildings. The back streets off Brick Lane were particularly fruitful, especially Princelet Street, a terrace of Georgian properties, of which Number 4 is still in its 18th Century condition and available to hire as a location for photography, filming and private functions.

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I’ve decided to look into the concept of ‘Digital Decay’ as my thesis project. We are all aware of physical decay as it effects every aspect of of lives – our cars break down, our shoes get holes, the paint on our walls flakes. But living in the post-digital revolution as we now are, we must consider decay in the digital sense. What will eventually happen to all this data we save, burn and store?

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So this was a short project with Dirk Lellau which looked at space through the medium of weather, and was restricted to our Uni campus on Marylebone Road.  I focused on the materiality of the windows and was interested in their control over the atmosphere of a volume, rather than what is beyond them. Of particular interest was the contrast in my experiences of the weather.

In my flat I am surrounded with windows and roof-lights, I hear the rain pounding the tiles, I am blinded by the sun as it sets, piercing dark storm clouds, I see the frost glistening early on a winter’s morning. As I step into the studio, I feel immediately restricted. I am allowed only a thin band window with which to experience the weather and a series of looming, filthy, frosted roof-lights which provide me with a sense 

of what exists beyond them. My whole experience of weather is reduced to light. A dull, pale, grey is cast over the rutted wall surface of a stair well.

This oppressive environment provides an intensified appreciation of these moments of the spectacular. A sudden burst of sunlight illuminates a discoloured roof-light with a warm glow. It comes alive with deep turquoise, orange and blue, where before there was only gray. The glass glistens like a fine slab of splendid marble. We are reminded that the weather exists when it is so easy to forget in these monotonous labyrinths.

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